There’s been this Bible verse stuck in my head lately, Revelations 2:17, which says:
To he who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches, ‘To him who overcomes I will give…a white stone and a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it
This blows my mind. To me that stone, my stone, and the name written on it that only I will know, is the ultimate articulation of who I truly am meant to be. I believe that God stitched every one of us humans together for a very unique and specific purpose and that the name we receive written upon that rock is the ultimate and indisputable explanation of our identity and our destiny. How amazing is that? No more questioning, “Who am I and why does it matter that I exist?” We’ll know! We’ll have a constant reminder of it that only God and we will know.
The book of revelations is considered to be prophecy: a prediction of things to come. The weird thing for me is that when someone tells me something that will happen in eternity I have a hard time waiting for it in the future. Eternity already is it isn’t something we have to wait for to happen. In light of this verse that means that there is already a white stone with a name written on it and that the expression of ourselves written on that stone is already true about ourselves, RIGHT NOW. That means that I already have a specific identity and purpose in the Kingdom of God as I live my days on this earth.
That is an amazingly humbling thought for me. It seems to me as though I’ve never known my true identity and if I ever did I didn’t feel as though it was good enough or valuable. So, I tried “blinging-out” my white stone and the ME it was associated with: I tried to look really nice, be really smart, be caring compassionate ETC. None of these things are bad but what I was doing was trying to hot glue pearls onto my identity, which readily feel off and reinforced the idea that my identity wasn’t beautiful or precious.
Right now I’m in the process of finding, examining, and utilizing the white stone that God has given me that I’ve buried with self-contempt and defaced with posturing over the years. It’s a difficult process because some of the things I tried to convince myself and others were true about myself aren’t necessarily true no matter how much I’d like them to be.
I’m also discovering the deep festering wounds that were left in the wake of me trying to shape my identity into something that it wasn’t. It is one of the most painful processes I have ever encountered, but it’s worth it. In my short time free from the prison of self-contempt and posturing I have grown too large to fit back into my old cell and my heart is no longer hard enough to withstand the anguish of projecting something about myself that I know is untrue of my identity.
